Sure, it's hilarious when people fall down, but the second worst part* of any giant impending storm is when weatherpeople and their idiot producers feel like it's somehow necessary to shoot outside, with the wind and rain battering the poor TV personality. We get it. Storm bad. No need to risk being swept away by God's wrath on the East Coast for a two minutes of forgettable pseudo-news coverage.

* Ranking significantly beneath the destruction and human misery, clearly.

I understand that someone must be Googling "what to ask before penis surgery", so it's possible CNN is doing the online world of information a favor with the article "5 questions to ask before having penis surgery", but I think the post brings up as many questions as it answers.

1. Who are these "tens of thousands of men" getting circumcised as adults?
2. Do we really have to suggest to people having penis surgery that they "clean up before"?
3. Can I just spend all five questions on the first one CNN mentions, "Do I really need this procedure?" and then follow up with "Seriously, do I really need this procedure?"
4. If this whole "penis surgery" thing is really necessary, they knock you out for that sort of thing and then erase the entire experience from your brain with one of those devices from Men in Black, right?

Life is confusing enough, CNN. This isn't helping.

[HT: The Hairpin]

In Ruben Navarrette's latest op-ed, he takes aim at NBC, even giving the broadcast company's acronym a new meaning: 'Nothing But Caucasians.'

Navarrette doesn't just pick on television executives, but he also throws in a nice jab at those darn nativists. The result are a few comments that reminded me of some of the lovely gems thrown around the Range from folks worried the Aztlan dream is beginning to take place.

Navarrette's piece here and a tidbit below:

And it is true even in the most heavily Latino city in the United States. According to the 2010 Census, Los Angeles is more than 48 percent Latino. And yet, at KNBC-TV, Channel 4, there are currently no Latino anchors. It's also the case that Latinos, including veteran on-air journalists, have been overrepresented in recent layoffs. Other stations in that market have long had at least one Latino anchor.

This rollback of diversity efforts reflects "a lack of commitment to the Latino community," wrote Michele Salcedo, president of the National Association of Hispanic Journalists, in a letter to Craig Robinson, the new chief diversity officer for NBCUniversal. According to a statement by Salcedo on the organization's website, Robinson assured her "that it is not his goal to be without Hispanic anchors, and he and station executives are continuing to recruit Hispanic anchors and on-air talent." He also promised that the anchor lineup would look different in six months, according to Salcedo.

Just out of curiosity, what was Robinson's last job before becoming the diversity chief at NBCUniversal? Answer: He was the president and general manager at KNBC in Los Angeles, where he oversaw the creation of the same problem he now promises to fix.

Time to change the channel.

KFMA Morning Show Host Fook Gets His New Rock Revenge by TucsonWeekly

I can't listen to this clip from Wednesday's KFMA morning show because it's still too painful, but if you'd like to hear evidence of my mistreatment at the hands of a Five Finger Death Punch fan, this is your opportunity.

Now, I'm going to go back to updating my LiveJournal.

It'll be a few days before we get to find out the worst state in America as determined by Gawker, but it feels like Arizona probably has it in the bag, right? After all, we "won" the last of these when GQ arbitrarily ranked the 50 states, and if they're going to give New York the title of Best State Ever because they have gay marriage, a global cultural center, and the Catskills, I'm sure it'll be all Brewer, Arpaio, and the usual suspects.

C'mon, Mississippi's new oppressive immigration law is about to go into effect, so they have to start competing for last. Plus, the Grand Canyon! No one else has one of those. Help us out a bit.

[Gawker]

If you happen to see the above post at Pop Culture Brain, a solid site aggregating TV, movie, whatever news, let me make a (unrequested) clarification on that site's behalf.

In that sentence:

a) "Paris Hilton" means what you think. The minimally talented heiress/person who doesn't know when to go away.
b) "Oxygen" is referring to a cable network, not the generally gaseous element required for most life on Earth.
c) "Cancels" means that the show you likely weren't watching that starred Paris Hilton won't be on anymore, not that her existence is being eliminated or negated somehow.

So, if you (like me) read that sentence and thought that the air that we breathe somehow developed personal and human emotion and ability and decided that it was through helping Paris Hilton exist, that would be an incorrect assessment of the "news". A cable channel just isn't going to run a show with her on it.

Seriously, it does. Check out this little number outside Café Passe on Fourth Avenue. Hipster belt buckle and all.

I don't know what my favorite aspect of this ad that ran in the Austin Chronicle today, but there are a number of contenders.

a) The Star Wars font.
b) That the guy who paid for the ad claims to have knowledge of Rick Perry's infidelity because he is "a patron of Austin strip clubs” who has “excellent contacts in the Austin strip club community.”
c) The seemingly unnecessary and somewhat indecipherable Hillary Clinton reference
d) That the ad is willing to take down Perry on either hetero- or homosexual fronts.

It's going to be a long road to the 2012 election, so I'm willing to accept any form of amusement to make the time go by quicker. Thanks, Robert Morrow!

[Mediaite]

While semi-famous literary critic Dale Peck would disagree (he led his review of The Black Veil with "Rick Moody is the worst writer of his generation"), if you're going to criticize Rick Moody, calling him a "hack" probably isn't the way to go.

Still, if you're a Tucsonan, reading Moody's essay "reflect[ing]" on our city in Newsweek, it's a little difficult to understand what exactly he's trying to say. Oh, you saw a man playing banjo in the heat? People riding unicycles? Someone let you in on the secret of how we leave bodies in ravines, just for kicks? This guy has us pegged!

However, this is sort of Rick Moody's beat. I couldn't even try to describe the first section of his novel The Four Fingers of Death. It's oddly funny. It's definitely strange, but I wouldn't necessarily be able to tell you what it's "about". Moody is a style guy. He operates on a different plane than nearly every other writer out there. He spends quite a bit of time discussing different body fluids and zero gravity. I don't know why, but he does do it well.

I guess he's supposed to give the readers of Newsweek a sense of what Tucson is like, now that we're largely out of the unfortunate national spotlight brought on by Jared Loughner, and he does that in an artsy way, I guess, but it's a mistake to blame Moody for being Moody. Maybe it's a better question to wonder why they couldn't just find someone who lives here to talk about Tucson these days (and no, I don't mean me). Tina Brown probably found out Moody was coming to town and asked him to throw something together, and that's a spectacular idea on paper. It just might be a short sighted one. Moody mentions that we have great tacos still post-January 8th and paints a beautiful picture of the monsoon clouds rolling in, but he doesn't say really say anything, and that's a shame. Not because Moody isn't a great writer, but because someone else should have been given the opportunity to tell our city's story.

Considering I'm generally judged in my job performance by how many people come to the Tucson Weekly website, it's a positive thing when any article of ours gets mentioned by a national website. I personally might not have much use for Andrew Breitbart's chain of websites, but clearly, a lot of people read Big Government and the others, so in general, it's a good thing for me to see a post like yesterday's "A ‘Marxist’ Agenda Against a Freedom Center" commenting on Tim Vanderpool's "Freedom's Ring" from last week's issue. I think the anonymous author's conclusions are a little absurd, but we do write things to create conversation and discussion, right?

However, here's what's strange: while there are 51 comments on the Big Government site, there hasn't been that much traffic to the article itself. Since the Big Government article went up, there have only been 18 unique visitors to Vanderpool's story that came from the link inside the article. Even saying that maybe a few people came to the article later or from another source, there are still a lot of people commenting on the linking article without actually reading the source material. Certainly, I imagine the same thing happens at the Huffington Post or wherever liberals are going from caustic opinion pieces these days, but in general, it's a good thing to actually try to understand an issue before issuing your definitive take on the issue, right?